Buy opium from Afghanistan

APU.S. Army Staff Sgt. Gerrad Mitchell, 27, from Charleston, S.C., of the 10th Mountain Division, stands guard with Afghan soldiers during a joint patrol in a village in the Jalrez Valley in Afghanistan's Wardak Province last month.By Gene Tinelli

The Opinion section article, “The Perilous Way” (Oct. 6), outlining the three risky options for us in Afghanistan, was excellent.

Going all in by increasing troop strength and nation building will result in more casualties and be hobbled by a corrupt and incompetent Afghan government. We tried that at the beginning of our war in Vietnam. It failed.

Prolonging the status quo without a troop strength increase keeps us in a prolonged, slow-bleed situation, increases the number of “accidental guerillas,” makes our forces targets of opportunity and has no successful end game. We tried that in the middle of our war in Vietnam. It failed.

Finally, scaling back to engage simply in counterterrorism operations and giving the Afghan army/police a much larger role will give control of the countryside to the Taliban and reduce us to occupying cities. We tried that at the end of our war in Vietnam. It failed.

It appears that our thinking is locked into only lose-lose options and that the game is out of our control.

In the 1983 movie “War Games,” we are locked into a super computer-directed doomsday scenario game that can’t be stopped, the end result of which will destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust. The lead character, David (Matthew Broderick), who accidentally started this mess, realizes the only way is to create a paradigm shift and give the supercomputer a new game to play (tic-tac-toe), which ultimately teaches it the concept of futility, which shuts down the original deadly game. Better to play a nice game of chess.

How can we change the game in Afghanistan?

People like to make money, and the supply and demand cycle of the free-enterprise system is the most efficient and least dangerous way to do this.

Let’s make the Afghans an offer they can’t refuse. Buy their farmers’ opium and sell it to international pharmaceutical companies who need opium base to make analgesic medications.

Opioid-based analgesics (e.g., Oxycodone) have been in short supply because pharmaceutical companies have difficulties getting enough legal raw opium to make these prescription medications. This results in more human suffering.

Afghan farmers are one of the world’s largest illegal suppliers of opium.

Our present policy is to poison their poppies, increase opium’s price and leave the profits to those who would create terror and fanatical oppression.

We could change the game by setting up a free market system to buy raw opium and sell it to pharmaceutical companies. The reasonable and stable prices Afghan farmers would get should entice them to be our allies in a saner social and economic system and, since money usually trumps ideology, many insurgents would follow the money. Everybody from tribal leaders to the American government could get a cut of the profits. Rather than our military personnel going into the mountains to set up remote bases, those Taliban and Al-Qaida who would abhor this would have to come out of the mountains to try to destroy this system, an ideal situation made for our Syracuse-based Predator pilotless aircraft and United States military snipers.

Buying Afghan opium is a capitalistic paradigm shift that even filmmaker Michael Moore would endorse. The only losers would be those who still support our anachronistic war on drugs policies.

We are currently lost in an Afghan game of futility and we must step out of the self-made box in which we’ve put ourselves. As Walt Kelly’s character Pogo said: “We have met the enemy — and he is us.”